As you may have seen reported in the news Network Ten has gone into voluntary administration. The Network has a $200 million loan that will no longer be garenteed by two of it’s share holders.

What does this mean for it’s regional affiliates?

There are reports that Ten plans to operate as normally as possible. If this occurs, not much will change for the affiliates – Win and TDT Tasmania. If not, Win will have to find another source of programming. TDT is also affiliated with Seven so it may ditch the Ten affiliation altogether.

Could we see more local sport on TV?

Win currently broadcasts a local news bulletins into each of it’s coverage areas. It also produces a national news bulletin with stories from the local bulletins.

As you can imagine I’m in two minds on this. It’s clearly a bad thing as people may lose their jobs. But it also put’s me in a position where I may be supplying content to Win. If I had it my way, the employees of Ten would keep their jobs and I would be supplying programming to Win.

If you’ve read the last paragraph and gone ‘what the?’ I produce sports coverage over on the PattmanSport Youtube channel. This includes the above video.

Ten says it’s well on it’s way to raising the money through reduced broadcast licence fees and cheaper content deals. It may survive this, it may not.

An interesting article came across my twitter feed this afternoon. Apparently the Australian Football League has approached Google to broadcast matches live on YouTube. If this is true it would not be anything new in the sporting world. It wouldn’t even be new for Australian rules football.

The North East Australian Football League streams one or two games live each week.

The North East Australian Football League broadcast games through their YouTube channel each week. Even the representative game gets broadcast.

If the AFL follows the NEAFLs model, the audience will be able to watch replays of the match without said replay being otherwise uploaded.

There are, however, a couple of issues with Google getting the rights. First is Australia’s anti-syphoning laws. In short these laws require curtain events to be offered for broadcast to Free to Air television networks. The list of events includes all AFL matches. Channel Seven have, in recent years, waived outright five matches each week. The other four matches they’ve only waived in part.

The other issue the Australian Football League would face is internet bandwidth. The AFL would be looking at about nine or ten gigabytes per match. There being nine matches each week, this works out to be about ninety gigabytes a week. An audience member watching even a three or four games would chew through there home data allowance fairly quickly, their mobile data definitely.